Travelin’ and unravelin’
leaving miles of web behind
tangled up with sticky notes
caught flat on my tongue
I see you in my mind’s mirrors
through a complex lens
hearing you
with jaundiced eyes
missing you
until I overflow
and crash
Friday’s Theme Music
How ’bout an Elton John favorite today. Let’s consider two. “Funeral for A Friend” and “Love Lies Bleeding” are often played together. They nicely complement one another. The first is an instrumental that starts with blowing winds. I can see the funereal procession of somber faces, and then the aftermath, thinking about what’s brought you to this moment. The music picks up as you think about what you’ll do next. It’s a bit chaotic, but then starts clarifying and rising, lifting your energy as you march forward, your decisions made.
“Love Lies Bleeding” begins like brisk fresh start. “Okay, this happened, but life goes on, and I’m going on.” But the words tell an unfolding story of betrayal, reflection, and exasperation.
Together, you end up thinking, “Yep, that’s life.”
Of course, the two songs came off of the fascinating 1973, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, an album about growth, change, and rock and roll’s influence on a young person’s life. Yeah, we played it a few times.
Telling
Beers glasses were raised and clinked together. Tastings followed. The trio got down to business.
“How’d it go with the date?” Ron asked Pat.
“Good, real good.” Pat smiled. “Third one, so you know what that means.”
Bryan laughed. “Is that what that still means?”
“Yes.” Pat nodded. “Indeed, it does.”
Ron raised his glass. “To your new girlfriend? Or is it too early?”
Pat grimaced. “It might be too early. She’s a swell person, wonderfully intelligent and accomplished, sexy, of course — ”
“Of course,” Ron said as Bryan said, “That’s a sexist attitude.”
“It is, but she is a knockout.” After glancing over his shoulders, Pat leaned in over the table. The other two leaned in as well. “The only thing is, she farts a lot,” Pat said in a low voice. “They don’t make any noise, so it’s not that, but they smell terrible.”
“She farts?” Bryan said.
Pat nodded. “And it’s not a little poot now and then. When she farts, I want to flee like the villagers running from Godzilla. And it’s not her fault. We’ve talked about it. She’d apologized after I complained about the rank smell invading my car. She told me it was a side effect of a medicine she’s been on a long time. She’s tried changing her diet and she’s looked into other meds, but nothing will work for her. And anxiety, like from dating, apparently makes it worse.”
“Wow.” Looking at Bryan, Ron sat back. “That’s a shame. A smelly farter. Damn”
Pat sighed. “Yeah, I’d hate for it to end for that, because she’s otherwise so wonderful, and I feel lucky to know her and be dating her.”
Bryan nodded. “Have you told her about your troubles in peckerville?”
Sitting back, Pat sipped his beer a moment and then smiled. “No. The way I see it, there’s no sense in telling her about that until I know if I can live with the farting.”
Breaking it Down
While working on the yard and house today, songs run through my head. I don’t mind it if they’re barefoot, but some of them wear heavy combat boots. That leaves a mark.
One song was the Rupert Holmes song, “Escape”. Most know it as “The Piña Coladas Song”. It’s all about how badly Rupert and his lovely lady were doing. He sees an ad in the newspaper’s personal columns and reads, “If you like piña coladas and getting caught in the rain. If you’re not into yoga, if you have half a brain. If you like making love at midnight in the dunes of the cape. Then I’m the love that you’ve looked for, write to me and escape.”
So he writes to the paper, answering the ad. They meet, and guess what? It’s his own lovely lady that he’s meeting. She’s the one that put the ad in the paper! So, Rupert continues, then we laughed for a moment and I said, “I never knew
That you like piña coladas and gettin’ caught in the rain. And the feel of the ocean and the taste of champagne.”
Mind you, she’s advertised for a lover; he answered that ad. They were both looking for someone else.
At this point, in real life, if he said, “I never knew that you like piña coladas, she’d reply, “That’s because you never listen to me.” Then it’d probably be on. He’s already confessed that he was tired of her. She’s clearly tired of him, too.
Yeah, I don’t see a happy ending here. I don’t think that either one is the lover that the other one was trying to find.
Of course, my mind also suggested, “Well, maybe it’s a small town. What are the odds of her putting the ad in and him answering? Those odds improve if it’s a small town.”
Then my mind went all Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on me. I imagined the bar patrons familiar with the situation saying, “Oh, no, here we go again.”
I concluded from this that my romantic band of my spectrum of being must be tiny.
Dead Voice
The dead voice comes from my girlfriend’s friend
She tried to tell what was to come in the end.
She said, “You think she loves you and she probably does,
but she’s a minute lover, and your minute’s almost up.”
I declined to hear her lines, I knew what the was, was.
Because I knew better, I knew how I feel, I knew the moment,
I knew my feelings were real.
That must count for something in a life of change.
If you can’t trust yourself, what else remains?
I told myself, she’s wrong, it may have been that way before,
but this sex is love, of that I was sure.
Fast forward the way that time flies in our lives.
Like birds we see in the corner of our eyes.
Here and then gone leaving echoes of their songs,
leaving us to wonder and question, where’s it all gone?
Rescue
If I rescue you, you’ll rescue me.
Our minds can understand it, but our eyes can’t seem to see.
We keep trying to save each other, but hate gets in our way.
One day, it’s love, the next day it’s hate, and we don’t know what to say.
I sometimes reach for you but you shake me off.
Sometimes you reach for me and I shake you off.
You hurt me and I hurt you back.
There’s so much we don’t understand, so much we lack.
Then you do something that reminds me of who you are.
And I think again, we’re on the right path, but the destination’s too far.
And I know I’m wrong because this isn’t right.
It’s not the destination, but the journey together, that I think about at night.
Sunday’s Theme Music
“Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” is all over my private music streams today. It kicked into the stream yesterday. I don’t know why. Maybe I caught a piece of it airing out of a passing car.
The song, performed and released by Stevie Nicks, is one of my favorite Nicks songs. Tom Petty sings on it, and the Heartbreakers played the song. It wasn’t surprising to discover that Mike Campbell of the Heartbreakers and Tom Petty were the song’s co-writers. It has their flavor all through it. I like the song for its anguished sense of what’s been going on, and the decision that a line’s been drawn, and this needs to end now.
Baby, you come knocking on my front door
Same old line you used to use before
And I said yeah, well, what am I supposed to do?
I didn’t know what I was getting into
So you’ve had a little trouble in town
Now you’re keeping some demons down
Read more: Stevie Nicks – Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around Lyrics | MetroLyrics
You know that’s how it often goes. Love is difficult to find. We don’t like letting go, or giving up. Makes us feel like unwanted losers, doesn’t it? Yeah, and momentum and familiarity are easy to form and hard to break.
Infloofable
Infloofable (floofinition) – a relationship between animals, or between humans and animals, that’s indescribable.
In Use: “The infloofable complexity of how her cat calmed and grounded her, allowing her to be more comfortably in the world, exceeded humanity’s ability to understand.”
Haifloof #30
curled and tucked, they lie
paws to hands and fur to skin
slumbering in bliss
Michael Seidel, writer 